
GnomeBeGone
The idle game that hates idle. Hover your pickaxe over 400 waves of gnomes across 4 hostile worlds. Forge 8 cursors, master a 127-skill tree, trigger Frenzy Mode, survive the trillion-HP Pinata Boss. ~40 hours of handcrafted code-art mayhem for the price of a coffee.
Does this feel indie?
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6 itemsAbout the Game
Most idle games let you set a timer and walk away.
This one watches you walk away and laughs.
GnomeBeGone is active-idle: your pickaxe cursor is the entire weapon. Damage ticks while you hover, gnomes flee when you chase, and the moment you put the mouse down - a Healer beams in, a Frenzy Gnome bolts past, your kill quota implodes. Stop moving, lose the wave.
You spend gold between waves on a sprawling skill tree of upgrades that bend the cursor into something unrecognisable: a multi-target chain-lightning array, a turret commander, a gravity-well operator, a kill-streak gold farm with a 5% instant-kill golden pickaxe. By wave 200 you're not playing - you're engineering.
Why play?
Every pixel hand-drawn - no AI, no asset packs. All 10 gnomes, all visual effects, every UI panel and every SFX synth voice generated in code by a solo dev who refused to stop until it felt good.
127 skills, 260 ranks. Damage, Utility, and Gem trees with multi-rank stats, milestone unlocks, prerequisites that reward planning. Burn-spread builds, turret armies, gravity wells, kill-streak farms, instant-kill golden pickaxes. Every run, a new strategy.
Modifier waves rewrite the rules. Pitch Black drops the lights. Caffeine Rush doubles spawns. Ghost Miners phase through immunity. Fission Miners split when killed. The **Pinata Boss** is a stationary trillion-HP money piñata. You get a 3-card draft before each one.
Rebirth that doesn't punish you. Cap a world, rebirth into the next: keep an ever-stacking damage/gold multiplier *and* get back 80% of every gold and gem you spent. The skill tree wipes — you re-buy it fast.
Designed to be played in short bursts. Three save slots, 60-second autosave, offline earnings, "just one more wave" loop.
A note from Bearded Chav
Hi. I'm Mike. I'm 41. I'd never shipped a game before this one.
GnomeBeGone is what happens when a hobbyist user decides - at the worst possible age and in the worst possible market - to actually finish something. Every visual is hand-drawn in code because I couldn't draw and refused to stop. Every wave is hand-tuned because I had nobody to tune them for me. Every sound is synthesized in Python because the budget for assets was £0. Every system was rewritten until my son said "this one feels good, dad." That's the bar.
If you have fun, tell a friend. If something feels off, tell me. I read every review and every Discussion post. This is a solo project, but it doesn't have to stay that way - the patches that matter most come from players who play.
Much love,
Mike
Bearded Chav Games